Wednesday, September 30, 2015

Perhaps the differences will be minimal. In France, the Catholic churches will become mosques; in England, the village pubs will cease serving alcohol; in the Netherlands, the gay nightclubs will close up shop and relocate to San Francisco. But otherwise life will go on much as before. The new Europeans will be observant Muslims instead of post-Christian secularists but they will still be recognizably European: It will be like Cats after a cast change: same long-running show, new actors. Or maybe the all-black Broadway production of Hello, Dolly! is a better comparison: Pearl Bailey instead of Carol Channing, but the plot, the music, the sets are all the same. The animating principles of advanced societies are so strong that they will thrive whoever's at the switch.

But what if it doesn't work out like that?

Best not to ask. Because if you do, you'll get prosecuted, like Marine Le Pen. Best to talk about the dangers of "climate change", as the Pope is doing this week, even as in the heart of Christendom the post-Christian future is showing up at the express check-in. For us 19th century imperialists a hundred years past our sell-by date, the migrant army indicts almost every contemporary western worldview: from Iraq and Afghanistan come the product of a decade of ineffectual desultory "nation-building"; from Libya of frivolous pointless interventionism, and from Syria of non-interventionism; and from everywhere else from across the map of the ruthless demographic logic of what happens when an impoverished dysfunctional tide of humanity next door to a depopulating not-so-gated community of soft decadent poseurs has sufficient access to "social media" to figure out whose system is easiest to game. The west's cultural imperialism - the smart phones, the TV shows - do not spread western "values" but only western weakness: Look at how we live! And how close and undefended we are!

"I want to go to Germany". If everyone goes to Germany, there will be no Germany to go to. But Angela Merkel has given a generation of young men from the Mahgreb to the Hindu Kush their battle cry. And the lesson of this month is that no one will stop them.

Oh, don't get me wrong. There are real refugees in Europe, and there will be more: Ask a Jew in Toulouse, a gay in Amsterdam, an uncovered woman in Rosengard...